Report on the Conference on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 , January 7-10, 2004
Sponsored by the Asia Center, Harvard University
Early in January this year, almost sixty years after the conclusion of one of the most catastrophic conflicts of the twentieth century, the Asia Center at Harvard University held an international conference to discuss the military history of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945. The conference, held on the island of Maui , January 7-10, brought together over forty scholars from China , Japan , the United States , Taiwan , and Britain to present and comment upon papers which dealt with the origins, the combatant forces, the strategies, the decision-making, and the principal military operations of the war. They also analyzed the place of the conflict in Chinese military history and in the history of warfare generally. Bibliographic essays on the military history of the war surveying the most salient English, Chinese, and Japanese publications and archives were also prepared for the conference. In hosting the meeting, the Asia Center 's objective has been the compilation of the first substantive English history of the military conduct of the war.
The conference on Maui was the second of a projected series of dialogues on the Sino-Japanese War under the overall direction of Ezra Vogel, distinguished scholar of East Asia and professor emeritus of Harvard University . The first, focused on "Wartime China," was held at Harvard in the summer of 2002. Others are planned, including a conference on the cultural and social aspects of the conflict.
The Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 was one of the most violent national confrontations in modern times and certainly the most fateful and catastrophic war in the history of East Asia in the twentieth century. A precursor and then a major component of World War II, it fatally weakened one national regime, Nationalist China, and proved a quicksand struggle for the other, Japan. A national trauma in the histories of both combatants, the brutal nature of the conflict continues to haunt the relationship between the two countries. For different reasons, the war is a conflict that the Chinese refuse to forget and the Japanese are reluctant to remember.
For China , the war remains a scar across its modern past and is a source of genuine national outrage, even if it is also politically and even commercially exploited. In charting the path of twentieth century China , the Japanese invasion stands like a huge boulder in the road; one cannot write a comprehensive history of modern China without confronting it, so profound was its impact on the country's destiny.
For most Japanese, the war in China is a source of shame or, at best, acute discomfort and is usually consigned to the attic of national memory. It remains there in large part because there are few tangible signs within the country that serve to make the horrors of the "China War" a distinct and separate element within the larger tragedy of the Japanese wartime experience. There were no Chinese armies standing on Japanese soil, no "incident" at some bridge outside Kyoto that can be pin-pointed as the locus of the origin of the conflict, no "Rape of Nagoya" by Chinese forces that could perpetuate a sense of national indignation, and Japanese cities were leveled by American not Chinese bombers. Japanese are dimly aware that Japanese forces did unpleasant things in China , but that is the limit to which Japanese public memory is generally willing to go.
The political and military outcomes of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 also inevitably influence the perspectives of Chinese, Japanese, and American historians of the war. For Chinese scholars of all political persuasions, the war in China was a struggle for national survival and, of itself, that survival was a political triumph deserving recognition as a major reason for Allied victory in World War II. For Chinese legatees of the Guomindang this acclaim of a "national" victory is tempered by the fact that their cause was ultimately extinguished in the civil war in China that followed the Japanese defeat. But for mainland China scholars, the outcome of the war was not only a political but an ideological triumph which validated heroic doctrines and enshrined the reputations of Chinese communist leaders.
For Japanese scholars, sifting the ashes of national defeat, there is little in the history of the war that could allow national pride, let alone a sense of national triumph. For those who do not seek to justify or minimize Japanese atrocious conduct during the war on the one hand, or who do not desire to add to historical recriminations of Japan on the other, the field of research on the war has necessarily been more narrowly focused on the operational history of the war by Japanese armed forces in China. But in their desire to brush past the more horrific aspects of the war to achieve cooler and more professional judgments on its military conduct they run the risk of using bland or evasive phrases which inevitably provoke indignant responses from Chinese readers. It is perhaps only when the horror of what was done is more fully acknowledged that a more nuanced understanding of the experience of Japanese soldiers in China, to which Japanese scholars sought to draw attention, including of their professional activities but also of the reality that many of them too suffered, can become possible.
To the historian in the West, the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 has been seen as a thunderous struggle, distant in time and place, and, in the many decades since, obscured by the fogs of rhetoric and seemingly impenetrable foreign languages. Europeans date the beginning of World War II to the 1939 invasion of Poland . For most Americans, the war began Dec. 7, 1941 , when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor . Few westerners appreciate the length and savagery of the Sino-Japanese war that had been fought for years by either of those dates. Once involved in China 's war with Japan , Americans brought their own prejudices and priorities to the fight, as well as their own myth making. The "Flying Tigers", "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell, Claire Chennault, and American flights over "the Hump" have all assumed a more hallowed place in American national consciousness than they ever did in Chungking , Yenan, London , or New Delhi .
Many of these national attitudes toward Japan 's war in China , 1937-1945, were occasionally on display during the Maui conference. Yet, the fact that they never threatened to overwhelm the proceedings can be given three reasons. First, the participants -- Chinese, Japanese, and westerners -- were respected scholars in their own countries and men and women of good will who had come to the conference to participate in a dialogue not a diatribe. Second, we think it mattered that the organizers and hosts of the conference were Americans who held the cultures of both China and Japan in high esteem, had representatives proficient in one or another of the two languages, and had developed friendly professional contacts over the years in one or another of the two countries, and who generally tried to maintain a neutral stance in the debates that arose during the sessions. Third, it was not inconsequential that the relaxed and balmy environment of Hawai'i in a season when much of China and Japan was under bitter cold helped everyone relax and enjoy the tropical surroundings.
Finally, that the conference succeeded as well as it did (when similar efforts between Chinese and Japanese in the past had broken up amid mutual recriminations) may have been at least partly due to the conference format provided by the organizers. Invitations to all participants made it clear that the ultimate objective of the conference was the compilation and publication of an English-language military history of the war for Western readers. The organizers conceived that such a history would be authoritative, reasonably comprehensive (though not exhaustive), and balanced, that is to say, that it would not be dominated by the perspectives of any one nation. These conditions meant that the focus of the majority papers should be the military aspects of the war, with political, social, economic, or diplomatic perspectives included only where relevant. To this end, the organizers specifically excluded separate and highlighted attention to the issue of Japanese atrocities in the belief that 1) discussion of the topic would be so emotional that it might well disrupt the conference; 2) the subject had already received considerable attention in recent years in China, Japan, and the United States; and 3) the atrocities, however revolting, were not central to the ultimate military outcome of the war.
The extent to which suspicion and animosity between Chinese and Japanese remain legacies of the war was evident to a degree during the first several days of the conference. For the Chinese participants, the starting point for the discussions was the indisputable fact of Japanese aggression as the root cause of the war. For them, the moral dimension of the conflict had to be acknowledged before its factual history could be discussed. The Japanese were reluctant to confront their Chinese colleagues on this issue, though one Japanese scholar grumbled openly at the continuing reiteration of the Chinese position. During the first day, Chinese scholars also grumbled at some of the morally flatfooted Japanese attempts to explain away Japanese misbehavior in China. Such Japanese evasiveness was met publicly by silence, but privately gave rise to sharp annoyance. During the final days of the conference, however, a joint pursuit of the academic purpose of the gathering -- the first reliable history in English of the conflict -- gained the upper hand.
One point of scholarly contention was whether the war had been long planned by the Japanese army. Most Japanese historians believe that, in the summer of 1937, Japan had seen the Soviet Union as the greatest threat to its interests on the Asian continent, with the struggle for control or influence in Manchuria and Korea going back to the nineteenth century, and thus had merely blundered into conflict with China. Chinese scholars tended to see the eruption of the conflict in the summer of 1937 as the consequence of long-cherished Japanese plans for conquest.
A common view in Western scholarship on the origins of the war takes into account decades of Japanese bullying in China and long-held Japanese assumptions that China was a sphere of influence in which Japanese interests must be paramount and unlimited. Japanese Pan-Asianism, which was influential in the army and which saw it as its task to bring about a modern Asia free from Western domination under Japanese guidance, did seek to keep China divided and prevent the emergence of a centralized Chinese nation-state. But such Western assessments stop short of asserting that the fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge on July 7, 1937 was the result of calculated planning by either Japanese field armies or by the high command in Tokyo.
At the Maui conference, some Western scholars appeared to support this third position, one specialist on the Japanese military pointing out that on the eve of the war the bulk of Japanese army units on the continent were deployed in northern Manchuria along the Soviet border, not arrayed against China. Close attention to differences between military assessments and priorities and political ambition might lead to a reconciliation of these different views.
Another major difference in perspectives concerned the place of the Sino-Japanese conflict in the overall history of the Second World War. For the Chinese, the very scale of Chinese casualties in the war and the significant numbers of Japanese divisions tied down in China pointed to China's major contribution to the eventual Allied victory in World War II. Japanese participants, on the other hand, noted that the Japanese forces in China remained undefeated at war's end and Western scholars present noted that the Sino-Japanese war had little impact on the outcome of the war in the Pacific. In this perspective, for some, the Sino-Japanese War continued to remain largely a "peripheral theater" during World War II. Others argued that the China theater should not be judged solely by the criterion of the Chinese contribution to America's Pacific War, but that a broader perspective of the Second World War is necessary in which the China theater has its own relevance in the modern history of Asia.
For American historians, the role of General Joseph Stilwell proved a contentious and even sensitive issue. Commander of US forces in the China Theater, chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek, and charged with the distribution of American supplies to China, Stillwell continues to be seen in America as a war hero. Historical judgments about the China theater, Chiang Kai-shek, and the Nationalists continue to be influenced by "Vinegar Joe's" well-known critique of all those elements. Yet some Western and Chinese historians called for a radical reappraisal of Stillwell's role and of America's treatment of its wartime Asian ally.
Other issues debated during the four days included the spread of the conflict from an "incident" - a fire-fight - at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Bejing in July of 1937 to a full-scale conflagration in Shanghai the next month; Chiang Kai-shek's military and political priorities during the war; the reasons for the stalemate in the conflict by 1939; the impact of the Japanese air campaign against China, 1938-1940; the nature of foreign military aid and assistance to China; the question of the significance of such aid in the ability of Chinese forces to resist the Japanese; the place of the war in Chinese military history; and, finally, its place in the history of warfare generally.
Everything considered, the conference can truly be said to have marked a "first". In an aside to his American colleagues, one Japanese participant noted that past Japanese attempts to host similar scholarly gatherings on the subject of Japan's war with China had always ended in failure and mutual recriminations. More than this, it was apparent that the participants had embraced the stated purpose of the conference -- the compilation of a history of the war that would be comprehensive, authoritative, and objective -- and generally left the conference feeling that the exchange of views had been respectful and fruitful.
An editorial committee comprising Dr. Mark Peattie, research fellow of the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, Dr. Edward Drea, contract historian in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Dr Hans Van de Ven, Reader at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Cambridge University, and assisted by Professor Yang Tianshi of the Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Professor Hatano Sumio, Dean of the Graduate School of International Political Economy, Tsukuba University, is involved in a coordinated effort to pull the conference papers together for submission to a first-rank university press. The committee is aiming at a military history of the war that will not only be a scholarly pioneering effort on the subject of the Sino-Japanese conflict, but will be a distinguished volume, provided with adequate maps, tables, photographs, and selective bibliographies, which will serve as a landmark for scholarly research in modern East Asian history.
Detailed Record of the Conference
Sessions 1 and 2: Combatant Forces on the Eve of War
Session 4: Decision-Making in the Nationalist and Japanese Armed Forces during Wartime
Session 5: Japanese and Chinese Operations in Central China and the Onset of Military Stalemate
Session 6: The Japanese Air Campaign against China, 1937-1941, and Chinese Air Defense
Session 7: Combat Morale in the Japanese Army in China
Session 8: Chinese Guerrilla Operations and Japanese Anti-Guerrilla Operations, 1939-1945
Session 9: Foreign Military Aid and Assistance to China
Session 10: Military Operations in Yunnan and Burma, 1944
Session 11: The Japanese Ichigo Campaign and the Chinese Response, 1944
Session 12: The Military Situation in China at War's End
Session 13 : The Relationship between the Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars
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